Photonics

Hybrid Optics for Color Imaging

Today's glass-based lenses are bulky and resist miniaturization. To address the problem, two different imaging methods — a type of lens designed for nanoscale interaction with lightwaves, and robust...

Researchers Ready Cell-Sized Robots for Inspection Tasks

Researchers at MIT have created cell-sized robots that may someday be used to inspect and analyze hard-to-reach locations, from oil pipelines to the human body.

Silicon Photonics Scientist Demonstrates New Type of Laser

Northern Arizona University assistant professor Ryan Behunin collaborated with a team of physicists from Yale and the University of Texas at Austin in discovering an innovative way...

Research Project Will Produce Clearer Images of Space Objects

A research project designed to enable more precise imaging of space objects has moved from lab bench testing to field testing at the John Bryan State Park observatory,...

National Ignition Facility Sets New Laser Energy Record

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL) National Ignition Facility (NIF) laser system has set a new record, firing 2.15 megajoules (MJ) of energy to its target chamber – a...

New Products

CMOS Image Sensor Teledyne e2v (Chelmsford, UK) recently announced its Emerald 67 megapixel, the newest member of its Emerald CMOS image sensor family. The new sensor features a high resolution with a small global shutter pixel...

New Products

Trilinear Line Scan Cameras Teledyne e2v (Milpitas, CA) has announced its next generation of line scan cameras — the high-resolution ELiiXA+ trilinear color range. These new 8k pixel cameras are suited for industrial applications...

Eyes in the Sky: Using Optical Filters to Observe and Measure Earth From a Different Perspective

“Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it....

Principles of Laser Scanning Confocal Microscopes

Today’s high-resolution laser scanning confocal microscopes (LSCM), also referred to simply as laser scanning microscopes, are powerful high-magnification surface metrology instruments with a...

Military Optics Technology

The demand for innovative solutions to enhance the safety of military personnel is continually on the rise. This includes the need to improve the performance of military vehicles and aircraft, in terms of both safety...

Rethinking FPGAs for Smart Cameras

The term “smart camera” has been used for decades, but there has been little agreement on the actual definition. This article will use the term “smart” as the Merriam Webster dictionary defines it: the...

Taking It to the Streets: Designing Streetlamp Optical Components

The task of creating a streetlamp optical system has changed over the last 20 years and due to this change, so has optical design software. Let’s compare the task of designing...

Bringing Multispectral Imaging to Industrial Applications

A mere 20 years ago, machine vision system designers did all they could to avoid color imaging applications due to higher costs and greater system and software complexity. But as...

Solving a Problem that Plagues Scanning Tunneling Microscopes

Researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas have solved a longstanding problem that has been plaguing the scanning tunneling microscope for more than 35 years: How to prevent...

Imaging Flexible DNA ‘Building Blocks’ in 3-D

Over the past decade, researchers have been working to create nanoscale materials and devices using DNA as construction materials through a process called DNA origami. A single long “sca...

Seeing the Brain’s Electrical Activity

Neurons in the brain communicate via rapid electrical impulses that allow the brain to coordinate behavior, sensation, thoughts, and emotion. Scientists who want to study this electrical activity usually...

Lens-Free Fluorescent Microscope

Rice engineers have developed a wide-field microscope thinner than a credit card, small enough to sit on a fingertip and capable of micrometer resolution over a volume of several cubic millimeters.

See Objects Hidden Around Corners

A driverless car is making its way through a winding neighborhood street, about to make a sharp turn onto a road where a child’s ball has just rolled. Although no person in the car can see that ball, the car...

Fabrication Process Produces Nanostructures for Electronic Devices

Demands for improved computer processing power have led researchers to explore both new processes and other materials beyond silicon to produce electronic components....

New Products

CMOS Linear Image Sensor The S13774 from Hamamatsu Corporation (Hamamatsu City, Japan; Bridgewater, NJ), is a CMOS linear image sensor developed for industrial cameras that require high-speed scanning. The column-parallel readout...

Paired Sleep Tracker and Light Therapy Tools Retrain Circadian Rhythms

Spinoff is NASA’s annual publication featuring successfully commercialized NASA technology. This commercialization has contributed to the development of products and...

Transistor Material Provides Additional Computing Degrees of Freedom

For several decades, improvements in conventional transistor materials have been sufficient to sustain Moore’s Law — the historical pattern of microchip manufacturers...

Integrating Optical Components into Existing Chip Designs

Moving from electrical communication to optical communication is attractive to chip manufacturers because it could significantly increase chips’ speed and reduce power consumption, an...

New Products

Thermal Imager Sierra-Olympic Technologies (Hood River, OR) introduced the Tenum™640, a thermal imager with a 640 x 512 array and 10-micron pixel pitch. The new camera, from the Leonardo DRS line of uncooled thermal cores...

Scientists Create First X-Ray Holographic Images of Viruses

Holography, like photography, is a way to record the world around us. Both use light to make recordings, but instead of two-dimensional photos, holograms reproduce...

Depth-Sensing Imaging System Can Peer Through Fog

MIT researchers have developed a system that can produce images of objects shrouded by fog so thick that human vision can’t penetrate it. It can also gauge the objects’ distance.

Tracking X-Ray Laser Pulses at Record Speeds

To catch chemistry in action, scientists at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory use the shortest possible flashes of X-ray light to create “molecular movies”...

Essential Principles for Designing and Specifying Laser Optics

Laser engineers are leveraging new materials, unusual gain mechanisms, and innovative cavity designs to push laser performance into new regimes. Pulse lengths are getting shorter,...